Stephen, Not Steve - Endings and Rebounds

He dressed and carried himself like German nobility while quoting Bukowski and listening to Black Flag, often while doing tricks on a skateboard in the living room; avidly professing his undying love for me, just 4 weeks into our relationship. 

My room mate at the time thought he was pretentious. 

Side note: I have a terrible predisposition for being wildly attracted to pretentious men. I don't know why. There's nothing in my background to clarify this further even to me. 

Stephen may have been fronting, posing, or a pretentious asshole, as my friends claimed, but all this time I’m still quoting him on both rebounds and relationship endings, so maybe he was as bright as I gave him credit for after all.

10 years later, still facing endings and rebounds and choices my friends might question, these two statements I attribute to Stephen not Steve, have always stuck with me:

In regards to my concern that our relationship End Well: “Nothing ends well. If it were going to end well, it wouldn’t End.”

I’ve found this to mostly be a truth in romance. While I have seen a few relationship that have evolved and the people aren’t together but are still close, they are few and far between and don’t count as endings, just changings. Most things don’t change smoothly either.

Second, I expressed my feelings that he was still somewhat hung up on his last girlfriend and I was a rebound. 

He said “Aren’t they all rebounds, after the first one?”

Yes, yes they are.

From that I have learned, if you wait for someone to be completely over the last relationship before you date them, they will already be with someone else.

As much as I try to move on and clear my mind of thoughts of the past on my own, someone almost always gets me over the last person. I always have these lingering memories of my last involvement until I meet someone to replace those spaces in my brain. I may not want the last guy back, but that space in my head is usually taken up in a way that says "They are all rebounds after the first one."
Ex: Justin got me over Aaron who got me over Stephen.

On rare occasion the person who gets me over someone is the person I need to get over.

Ex: Jonathan got me over Brian who finally got me over JW; but then Jonathan got me over Jonathan himself, because he was such an exhausting jerk that I started feeling like I was in a Taylor Swift song, for like Ever.

Then there is the occasion I get experience the uneasy sensation of getting caught up with one while still bouncing off the last. It's rough on the equilibrium - feeling hurt and angry one moment while having the just as real feelings of anticipation and delight the next. But on the rare occasions it works, it's Stephen's rebound rule at it's finest: It's getting caught in the air before you ever hit the ground.